Pooches. Planes. Pandemic. Margret Grebowicz and Christopher Schaberg on mass phenomena transformed by Covid.

A lot of societal structures have been permanently upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. We’re here to talk about two: air travel and dog ownership. Margret Grebowicz, author of Rescue Me, talks about the abundance of pet adoptions during the pandemic and the existential and social implications of this trend. Christopher Schaberg, author of Grounded, discusses contemporary air travel and the broad cultural landscape of empty airports and grounded planes in the early months of the virus’s spread. Both are concerned with philosophical and critical inquiries into their subjects; how to think about things, how to frame phenomena and change, and how the future will continue to reshape these experiences.

Rescue Me and Grounded are in the Forerunners: Ideas First series from University of Minnesota Press.

Margret Grebowicz is associate professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. She is author of several books, including Rescue Me: On Dogs and Their Humans; Mountains and Desire: Climbing vs. the End of the World; The National Park to Come; and Whale Song.

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University and author of several books, including Grounded: Perpetual Flight . . . and Then the Pandemic; The End of Airports; and The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth.

REFERENCES:

-Rescue Me (Margret Grebowicz)

-Grounded (Christopher Schaberg)

-The End of Airports (Christopher Schaberg)

-The Dodo Videos (Facebook videos)

-cat videos, Tik Tok

-The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson)

-Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel; book, TV series)

-Tripoli Canceled (film)

-Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 (docuseries)